Reviews
The Cherry Orchard, Sovremennik, Noël Coward TheatreFriday, 28 January 2011
Plays these days come not in single spies but in battalions of two, whether you're talking The Master Builder, King Lear or The Cherry Orchard, the last of which closes the visiting Sovremennik Russian theatre troupe's three-play season only to... Read more... |
Christine Brewer, Wigmore HallFriday, 28 January 2011
Christine Brewer singing American song – it’s like Judi Dench in Shakespeare, or an Aaron Sorkin screenplay: it just doesn’t get any better. Forcing the restrained acoustic of the Wigmore to ring as though it were St Paul’s, and persuading a white-... Read more... |
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican HallFriday, 28 January 2011
There had been murmurings that his star had dimmed. That Gustavo Dudamel's partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (greeted with such fanfare in 2009) had yet to set the West Coast on fire. Had this Icarus flown too high? Would their debut... Read more... |
Du Goudron et Des Plumes, Barbican/ Flogging a Dead Horse, Roundhouse StudioFriday, 28 January 2011
Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy... Read more... |
Bronfman, Philharmonia, Salonen, Royal Festival HallFriday, 28 January 2011
"You have to start somewhere," remarked Debussy drily at the 1910 premiere of young Stravinsky's Firebird ballet. Even so, that was far more of a somewhere than the ultra-nationalistic Hungarian tone poem Kossuth, first major orchestral flourish of... Read more... |
Men on the BridgeThursday, 27 January 2011
As a child I lived for a while near the footings in Ortaköy of the Bosphorus Bridge, which was being constructed over the breathtaking straits of Istanbul. Our life as oil expatriates was many worlds away from the skinny hawkers, whistling traffic... Read more... |
Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain, BBC TwoThursday, 27 January 2011
Say what you like about the posh – they know their place. Equipped from an early age with a sense of entitlement, they also have access to the oldest and most powerful social network there is: call it what you will, but the old boys' network remains... Read more... |
Martin Creed, Hauser & WirthThursday, 27 January 2011
Who could not love Martin Creed? The tweed-encased harumphers of the world adore him, because they can say, “That’s not art,” and, “My cat could do that,” and have an all-round wonderful time. Conceptualists have it easy: what could be more fun... Read more... |
HereafterThursday, 27 January 2011
The depiction of a tsunami roaring up the beach and surging down the main street of an Indonesian seaside resort makes an enthralling opening to Clint Eastwood's latest creation. It's a terrifyingly visceral sequence that grabs you by the throat and... Read more... |
King Lear, RSC, RoundhouseThursday, 27 January 2011
But this comes at the expense of scale, both in characterisation - Jacobi is also simply too feathery - and in terms of space and time. We don't feel the outdoors at the Donmar, ever see and hear boorish Lear's knights, properly sense the passage of... Read more... |
Steven Isserlis, Academy of Ancient Music, Wigmore HallThursday, 27 January 2011
No self-mutilation or incest, but plenty of daddy issues at the Wigmore Hall last night in a musical glance through the Bach family album. Carefully keeping Johann Sebastian out of the way (presumably lest he show everyone else up and spoil the fun... Read more... |
Markovich, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallWednesday, 26 January 2011
The great thing about the paucity of Mahler compositions is that, when anniversary time comes, his late-Romantic buddies get to join in. And some of them, like Alexander Zemlinsky in his ravishing Lyric Symphony - being given a rare outing by the... Read more... |
